Early implementation of data transfer between personal devices was initially limited to less than ten characters per character set. As personal device technology has advanced, messaging applications were developed to address user demand to send communications to additional users without entering into in-person conversations. Traditionally, these messages were transferred between parties, without being secured or encrypted in any fashion, due to computing constraints associated with devices as they originated and terminated the messages.
To facilitate interoperability between various service providers, protocols were developed, such as the Short Message Service (SMS) standard, and subsequently the Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) standard. These protocols permitted transmission of finite character sets (for SMS) as well as small predefined multimedia files such as audio, video, and longer character sets than are supported by SMS.
More recent techniques allow for the digital renditions of the data prior to being output to a display or other device component to be secured and kept private. Delivery of message data either via SMS or MMS, however, generally requires displaying the transmitted message content on the display of a device. Such display methods may not adequately address the privacy concerns of individuals who prefer to keep the content of their conversations private while in the vicinity of other individuals.